L.A. TACO is about to embark on its biggest mission yet: to create a taco guide for every single neighborhood in Los Angeles! Along the way, we will also be releasing brief histories of each neighborhood to understand L.A. a little more and why each and every neighborhood that makes our fine city is unique in its own way. Keep an eye out for our Artesia food guide coming later this week.
Artesia is super-small, just a little over 1.5-sq. miles of land. First settled as a village in 1875 on Juan José Nieto’s Rancho Los Coyotes on former Tongva lands, the area would later become part of a city made from the confluence of adjoining towns known as “Dairy Valley” due to its hundreds of dairy farms, a sizable portion of which belonged to Dutch and Portuguese families. After formally becoming a city in 1959, Artesia’s agrarian past traces were still evident even into the 1970s. Some of Artesia’s older, bigger homes are thought to be remnants of its wealthy farming dynasties. Dairy Valley included Cerritos, a city that surrounds Artesia from three sides and maintains a close association with it. Both are part of what is known as L.A.’s “Gateway Cities” due to their adjacency to Orange County.
For many, Artesia is synonymous with the “Little India” portion of Pioneer Avenue, where a wide spectrum of Southern Californians makes the drive to browse saris, Bollywood movies, jewelry, and sweets, interspersed with lunchtime dosas and thalis, one of many boons of the boom of immigration from the subcontinent that began in the early 1980s. The majority of Artesia’s small 16,000+ population identifies as East Asian, Hispanic/Latino, and White, in that order, with South Asians making up less than 10% of the city’s population.